The other day, I visited the spot where I called my mom to tell her that campus was closing.
Back then, I was a sophomore, and it was a relatively warm day — for March in Cambridge at least. Ripples of the news could be felt everywhere. And despite the rushed confusion of that morning, I found a silent moment to sit in a small corner on the southwestern side of the Lowell House courtyard and call my mom’s number to explain the sudden crisis, for both her sake and mine. Across campus that morning, thousands of similar calls must’ve been made.
“Yes, I’m serious,” I told her. “Yes, I’ll have to come home… No, I don’t know for how long… Yes, I’ll be back in the Fall… No, I haven’t packed yet.”
In those ten minutes and forty-two seconds, the pandemic became real to me. I still know what it felt like. I still know how it stung. I still know how my guts sank into the earth. I still know how I began to cry. When I hung up the phone, the world was different.
Two years have passed since that day. The world is still different, and I am now, too — older, recently graduated, and about to move to a new city. But as much as I’ve changed during these years, entering and then breaking out of my own metaphorical chrysalis, for a long time as a senior, I still found myself emotionally unable to return to that corner of Harvard.
It was a place I avoided because it reminded me only of that moment. After living somewhere long enough, you start to have plenty of those — inseparable entanglements of space and time. As soon as I walk into the range of one of these points around campus, even unintentionally, I can feel the crashing wave of a past memory. Some bring a smile, and some bring dread, but each of them suddenly pull me out from my present self. So, in order to navigate safely across campus, I’ve gradually created a secret mental map of these gravitationally-heavy spots. The place where I said goodbye to my mom at the start of college. The place where I made my first college friend. The place where I pulled an all-nighter. The place where I first became confident in myself. The place where I puked out of nervousness before a math test. The place where I would habitually watch the sun set. The place where I got my first job. The place where I cried after finding out that my grandpa had died. The place where I last saw my college friends.
I don’t tell anybody about these locations, even though I figure that they likely have similar ones. I tell myself that maybe these places just wouldn’t mean as much to me if I told someone else. Or, maybe there’s a memoryless bliss in not knowing one another’s maps — that I can believe any location could mean anything to anyone. But deep down, I know it’s probably just my own emotional insecurity that keeps me from revealing these small places and the secret power they have over me.
When I finally returned to that corner of the Lowell courtyard, it wasn’t because of new wisdom or maturity but rather my fear of the rapidly-approaching conclusion to my college experience. Soon, I wouldn’t even have the opportunity to know how I would feel if I did visit the spot; so why not try now, after two years? As I crossed into its realm and sat on the wet stone steps, I found no sudden or grand realizations. It was emotionally unpleasant, for sure, to think of the move-out and the lost friendships and the pandemic isolation. In my chest, a dull and mild anxiety persisted but not nearly as strong as I had expected to feel. It was only temporary. That place just wasn’t the same anymore, and neither was I.
With a closed Harvard and a distorted world, living through the last few years has put most of us on unexpected and non-linear paths. In my own life, I’ve found myself having to create new meanings in “unprecedented” experiences and emotional times. These experiences challenged me. Made me better. Made me feel worse. And while it’s something I’m somewhat hesitant to admit, some of the happiest moments of my time in college are now associated with places beyond Harvard’s gates. The prairie where I would bike in my small South Dakota town. The grocery store in the green woods of northern New Hampshire. The hot sunny streets of a San Francisco birthday. The cloudy morning skies of eastern Wyoming. The cragged peak of Mount Katahdin. Without a doubt, there were periods of misery away from campus, but it became easier to find new personal joys when time simply kept passing on. Eventually, the emotional landscape of my friends and community began to dominate the physical ones such that the locations themselves mattered less and less. Being with people, rather than being in spaces, started to mean much more to me.
My high school English teacher once told me something I didn’t understand until last year: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Whether in South Dakota, New Hampshire, or on campus, I realized there I was — living, being, becoming, changing. At each place, it grew clearer that where we are is not so much about our actual location but about the people we become while we’re there.
Harvard’s campus has re-opened, but in many ways, I feel that Harvard has not. The places I knew are all still the same, but our post-2020 community is jarringly distinct from the student body that left campus in March two years ago. I found myself amazed by just how rarely we talk about the chasmic gap between the before and after. How rarely we consider the places we went and the people we became beyond Harvard. In fact, it seems like the entire pandemic has been socially compressed into one of the other formulaic, streamlined questions of dining hall conversation, with the same superficial banality as asking about upcoming midterms or weekend plans. I’ve done it too, and like everyone else, I’ve created my 30-second version of two years: I’m doing well; I was at home, with friends, on campus, with friends, on campus; did some remote work and school; yes, I’m graduating this spring. But these conversations always move with a shallow, predetermined rhythm. I find myself dazed by just how easily we discard the pandemic memories as soon as we transplant our roots back into campus soil. Why do we do that? Why do we never actually reckon with the abyss? Why don’t we ever talk about how strangely our campus community ignores and obscures personal well-being? Why don’t our shared spaces also serve as places for sharing our collective vulnerabilities? And why do we as a community so seldom imagine a world, and a politics, of well-being?
As we close this issue of the HPR, I hope to prompt that reckoning openly, to highlight the experience of encountering the intertwined places and emotions that define us, the systems that govern us, and the communities that nurture us. Only then, by understanding where we are — physically, emotionally, institutionally — will we be able to truly take a pause and genuinely consider the question of this magazine: How are you?
